Self-control versus state control
In a January 2017 episode, Tom Palmer, asked whether the American voting public had settled the question posed by the title of his book Self-Control or State-Control?, said it was “very much up for grabs.” He cautioned against reading broad conclusions about society into electoral outcomes, describing the choice between Clinton and Trump as one between two generally unsavory candidates who both offered more authoritarianism and more state intervention into people’s lives, leaving voters to choose which kind of poison to consume. Dr. Tom Palmer on Self Control vs. State Control (2017)
Palmer noted that the election turned on roughly 80,000 people, that the system is federal and based on the Electoral College, and that Trump won that body while losing the popular vote by a substantial margin, ending with one of the smallest victories in American history. He said this did not show a big shift in the electorate toward one thing or another, particularly given the options the two candidates presented.
Palmer contrasted Ronald Reagan’s acceptance speech with Donald Trump’s. Reagan said, “Don’t trust me. Trust in yourselves to live up to your own standards and hold me accountable to act within our Constitution.” Trump, by contrast, said “Trust me,” “I am your voice,” and “I alone can fix it.” Palmer characterized this as a claim to absolute power over the state and over people’s lives, and as inconsistent with the principles of the American founding. Bob Zadek called the side-by-side reading of the two speeches a way for listeners to understand the premise of Palmer’s book.
Authoritarianism distinguished from totalitarianism
Thaddeus Russell, in a June 2018 episode, drew a distinction between two terms. For him, authoritarianism is blunt coercive rule, the use of blunt coercive, often physically violent power. Totalitarianism is the convincing of the people that they are responsible for society, getting them to be good citizens and to psychologically invest in the nation-state. Thaddeus Russell on Renegades vs. Conformists (2018)
Russell placed Trump as more authoritarian than totalitarian, saying Trump had almost no one to agree with him: the national media, almost the entire national political establishment, and academia were hostile to him from the beginning. He said America was not in danger of going into fascism or totalitarianism, and that fewer Americans were invested in their country than ever before, which he called a nice byproduct of the Trump administration. He described authoritarians as tending to be dumb, trying to control people by whipping, imprisoning or killing them, and said authoritarianism generally tends to be ineffective, causing revolts and rebellions and revolutions.
Russell identified totalitarianism as the much bigger problem in the country. He called the New Deal a pretty totalitarian era and McCarthyism in the 1950s fairly totalitarian, while saying the United States had never been a truly totalitarian society. He traced a strong tendency in American culture to the Puritans, whom he called the founders of the culture and totalitarian, and to religious moral guardians, ministers, pastors, evangelicals and missionaries who traveled the country during the First and Second Great Awakenings telling Americans they were sinners. After the Revolution, he said, came professional police and firefighters, asylums for wayward women and children, and prisons in which prisoners were monitored, watched and listened to rather than put in a hole and left there. He also cited the rise of democracy, after which a significant percentage of Americans began talking about America as “me” or “I” or “us” and became more willing to volunteer for wars.
In the same episode, Zadek framed the country’s real political split not as blue against red or Democrat against Republican, which he called artificial, but as those who favor an authoritarian, big brother, powerful state controlling everything against those who favor freedom. He said both mainstream parties are enamored with the power they can accumulate over the individual, and that at the federal level authoritarianism seemed to be on the rise. Russell responded that it depends how authoritarianism is defined, then offered his two-term distinction.
The conversation turned to conscription. Zadek noted that during the American Revolution and the Civil War a drafted young man could hire somebody to go in his place, which he said caused riots during the Civil War because it was a poor person’s war. Russell said there was still a real democratic ethos in America during the Civil War and well into the 20th century, with generals and officers who lost limbs or their lives coming almost to a man from well-established wealthy families, and middle-class men enlisting as regular soldiers; 600,000 died and probably twice that many came home missing a limb or an eye. He called the ultimate democratic citizen someone willing to go to war for their country, and said a significant minority has always resisted draft and conscription, resisters he wants to make into heroes. Zadek credited Milton Friedman as probably the leading thinker who helped get rid of the draft. Russell called the draft enslavement, temporary enslavement, being forced by the state to risk your life, and said every major war in the country’s history except the Iraq War had a draft, with two-thirds of soldiers in World War II being conscripts. He added that every country involved in World War II had universal conscription throughout the war, and that 65 million people died in it.
On the Obama administration, Zadek asked what explained Obama’s aggressive attack on drug dispensaries in California that were lawful under California law, given Obama’s progressive background and antecedents in Berkeley. Russell said he had never seen any evidence of the decision-making or any reporting on it, and that how the administration thought about it was not public record. He noted Obama grew up in Hawaii as a pot smoker, attended Occidental College in Los Angeles where he was famous as a pot smoker and might have dealt pot, then went to Columbia Law School and reformed himself, changing his name from Barry to Barack. Russell said Obama is the paragon of American discipline and the perfect American citizen, and suggested the crackdown was partly a renunciation of his former self and more deeply the state disciplining local and state insubordination. Zadek began to say it was the federal government, and Russell agreed it was federal versus state, before the segment ended.
Populism and the presidency
In a January 2021 episode with William Howell and Terry Moe, Zadek closed by describing their book Presidents, Populism, and the Crisis of Democracy as showing authoritarianism in practice, calling the theory correct and the result kind of scary. He said the book is highly educational for anyone curious about how the political system works, the Trump phenomenon, and lessons exportable to other countries, and noted that some people say the country needs more authoritarianism and more fixers and fewer talkers. Populism After Trump (2021)
Earlier in that episode, Zadek said he was pained by how political the Justice Department has become, including the IRS, which he placed in Treasury, as an agency that gives too much power going back to Nixon and earlier. He endorsed the guest’s suggestions about excessive power in appointing heads of government agencies, saying the appointees are donors who support the president. On the Electoral College, Howell said he would support a national popular vote for president, calling the Electoral College a relic inherited from the Constitution that makes no sense for the modern era and that no other country has seen fit to replicate. Zadek said he would prefer proportionate distribution of electors based on the popular vote in each state rather than winner-take-all.
Immigration and authoritarian regimes
An October 2021 episode with Daniel Di Martino, described as a PhD student and Venezuelan immigrant, concerns the systemic failures of the U.S. immigration system, including the economic and national security costs of restrictive high-skilled visa policies, the lump of labor fallacy, and the benefits of admitting immigrants fleeing authoritarian regimes such as Venezuela and Hong Kong. Daniel Di Martino on Immigration (2021)
In the excerpt, Zadek says he used to favor a policy oversimplistically summarized as letting them all in, came to realize there were impracticalities in that, and now modifies his position to letting as many in as possible without suffering measurable, direct adverse consequences. The excerpt breaks off there.
Across episodes
The topic recurs across the 2017 Palmer episode, the 2018 Russell episode, the 2021 Howell and Moe episode, and the 2021 Di Martino episode. The excerpts show no development the sources state: Palmer treats authoritarianism as a feature of both 2016 candidates, Russell supplies a definitional distinction between authoritarianism and totalitarianism, Zadek later applies the term to a book about populism and the presidency, and the immigration episode mentions authoritarian regimes only as a source of emigrants.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not define authoritarianism in a single agreed way beyond Russell’s distinction from totalitarianism, and they do not state what any particular bill, case or amendment provided. They do not report the internal decision-making behind the dispensary crackdown, which Russell says was not public record. They do not describe the contents of Presidents, Populism, and the Crisis of Democracy beyond Zadek’s closing remarks, and the Di Martino excerpt ends mid-sentence.